Starting From Having No Goal Means Using the Order of Placing Before Slicing

Having no goal holds two different contents. Not finding anything to place, and not knowing how to place it.

If the block is the second kind, what follows is the target. You have a rough sense of the direction. Even so, it will not take the shape of a goal. Written out, it comes out either as something obvious or as something that will not happen.

The answer to this kind of block lies in the order. The templates advertised for goal setting demand, from the start, that a goal be measurable, time-bounded, and decomposable. All three can be judged only on indicators you already hold. So working to fit the template narrows automatically where a goal can be placed — to the range of what is currently measurable, which is the extension of the present.

What this article takes on is moving the third condition, decomposition, to the back. There is a reason for singling it out. Measuring and deadlines can be added after placing. Decomposition alone, done before placing, changes the placement itself.

Put another way, this article does not reject the template. Templates work correctly as instruments of management. What gets handled is what happens when that instrument is used at the stage of placement. The same instrument produces a different result from a shift of one stage. Where that difference comes from gets examined condition by condition.

The range this article does not take on is worth listing. Where no candidate comes up to place at all, the procedure here stops at the entrance. That state is handled in Having no dream is not a deficiency. The mechanism by which recognition moves only when something is placed outside the range belongs to Being unable to act is not a problem of will and Reading “unable to change” through cognitive science, and the way the placement itself drifts toward the extension of the present belongs to Self-transformation does not last because the order is reversed.

What the advertised methods demand is a candidate you can already put into words. Demanded in that form, the candidates narrow to whatever your current vocabulary can describe. Distant goals turn abstract not through any failure of the writer but because distance does that to them. And what changes after a goal is placed is not the pace of progress but the grounds on which the options in front of you get declined.

“Having No Goal” and “Having No Dream” Are Different Blocks

Separate the neighbouring state first. Handled while mixed, an ineffective prescription gets applied.

Having no dream is a state of finding nothing to place. No candidate comes up at all. What to aim at is unknown. The response there heads toward the conditions under which candidates arise.

Having no goal is a state of not knowing how to place. The direction is roughly sensed. Trying to turn it into a goal, it collapses. Made concrete it shrinks; made large it turns hollow.

The two get spoken of with the same word, and what is in hand differs. The first has no candidate; the second has a candidate that will not take shape.

One question tells them apart. Can you say, roughly, in one sentence, what a good outcome would look like?

If you can, it is the second. If you cannot, it is the first. Roughness is not a problem. “A state where more of my time sits on my side” or “a state where income is decided by my own judgement” is enough.

Saying it only roughly is surely the same as having no direction. It is not. Between a rough sentence and nothing at all sits a decisive difference. A rough sentence already works as a measure for sorting options.

Two jobs are in front of you; one takes a lot of your hours and the other does not. With a rough sentence, the two are comparable. With nothing, there is no axis, so the terms alone decide.

A rough sentence does not decide everything. What it decides is only what clearly points the opposite way. Even so, as material for judgement it works.

Mixed together, the response misses. A problem of placement receives a prescription of “search more,” and the searching runs on. You end up searching for what is already in hand.

The reverse mix-up occurs as well: applying a prescription for placement to a state where no candidate has arisen. In that case, writing to the template is possible. Choose a measurable indicator, set a deadline, decompose. The form comes out clean. That goal does not work as a measure for judgement, though. Built as a form with no sense of direction behind it, it does not sort options.

And because the form is clean, its not working is hard to notice. Reading back what you wrote, it does not look wrong. What is wrong is not the content but what it was placed for.

So it pays to run the question that tells them apart before starting. If it will not come out in one sentence, you are at a stage before this article’s procedure.

The Four Advertised Ways All Take Their Input From You as You Are

The widely advertised ways of setting a goal can be sorted into four.

Think from what interests you rather than from your life as a whole. Set both a medium-term and a long-term goal. Picture concretely how you want to be in the future. Understand your strengths and find it there.

All four work in real situations. The second is particularly effective. With a long term, the medium term acquires meaning; with a medium term, the long term becomes a reachable distance. That relation is observable in practice.

With that granted, extract the shared demand. All four ask for a candidate in a form you can explain now.

Interests are what you are currently aware of. Strengths are read off past results. A concrete picture of the future is one you can imagine now. A medium-term goal is a distance calculable from the present.

All four take their input from your present side. That is not a defect. There is no other input available.

The problem is that the output also lands on your present side.

Start from current interests and the goal settles within the range of those interests. Start from current strengths and it settles where those strengths apply. An operation whose input is on the present side produces output on the present side.

And this landing is hard to notice, because the goal that emerges feels genuinely suited to you. It is suited. It was built to suit your present self.

The fourth — finding it in your strengths — has one further problem of its own. Strengths come from results produced earlier. Results came out under the conditions that were in place until now. Strengths valued inside an organisation, strengths your current clients want. These are conditional records.

Change the conditions and the meaning of the strength changes. The record, though, carries no conditions. Only the conclusion remains. So the verdict “this is my strength” keeps operating after the conditions have changed.

Looking at strengths is not meaningless. As material it works. What can be said is that taking it as the starting point settles the goal with the conditions held fixed.

The four responses share one failure shape: the goal that emerges tilts either toward the obvious or toward the hollow. Place it at a distance calculable from the present and it is obvious; place it beyond calculation and it has no grounds, so it is hollow.

Demanding Measurability First Settles Where You Can Place

Widely used goal-setting templates share three conditions: measurable, time-bounded, decomposable.

All three work for managing execution. Without measurement there is no read on progress; without a deadline things get deferred; without decomposition nothing can be started.

The problem is using the same template at the stage of deciding where to place.

Demand measurability and the placement gets confined to territory where an indicator is already in hand. Revenue, unit counts, rates, follower numbers. These are already measured, so they can be goals.

Territory with no indicator yet cannot take a placement. There is no way to measure it, so the template’s condition fails.

Here is the real branch point. Changing the format tends to belong to the second kind. Changing how income arises, holding your own route to reach people, moving the agent of judgement. None of these are measurable on current indicators. Not measurable, so they drop out of the candidates.

What remains after they drop are goals in measurable territory. Raise revenue, raise unit counts, raise the rate. Each of these is executable within the current format.

So the more faithfully you set goals to the template, the more the current format gets fixed. The template is not at fault. A management template is being used at the stage of placement.

The same happens with deadlines. Setting one requires being able to estimate the time to completion. Estimation is possible only for kinds of work you have done. Work you have never done takes no deadline. So demanding a deadline narrows things to what you have already done.

Deadlines themselves are useful. Their effect on stopping deferral is real. What can be said is that demanding one first makes only deadline-able things candidates.

This narrowing leaves no record, because things drop before they stand up as candidates. Sometimes not even the memory of judging “this cannot be a goal” survives. So looking back later, what you dropped does not come out.

Demanding measurability does one more thing. The indicator itself starts getting treated as the goal.

Suppose you choose revenue as the indicator. At first you were watching revenue for the sake of something. From the moment it is placed as a goal, revenue stops being what you measure and becomes what you achieve.

Then, among the routes that raise revenue, any of them will do. Adding hours and changing the format produce the same result on the indicator. Indicators do not distinguish routes.

And of the two routes, the faster gets chosen. Adding hours tends to be faster. Placing the goal in measurable form has decided the route as well.

Slicing Before Placing Confines You to What Can Be Sliced

Slice first and the placement drops to the range that can be sliced.

Decomposition makes a goal executable. Split a large goal into medium ones, medium into small, down to what to do this week. That operation is what turns a goal into action.

Decomposition, though, has an ordering problem: it gets performed with the procedures you currently hold.

What you use when splitting is the process you know. You cannot split with a process you do not know. So what comes out of the split is a derivative of what you can already do.

Try to decompose “change the format of the business” and the units that emerge tend to be these. Gather information. Read a book. Ask someone who knows. Try something.

These are executable. Every one of them, though, completes without touching the format at all. Any number of rounds leaves the format unchanged.

And here a reversal of order occurs: the placement gets adjusted to what can be decomposed.

Try to decompose and fail, and the placement may get moved instead. Place it a little nearer and it decomposes. Nearer, and it certainly decomposes. At the moment it decomposes, the placement has returned inside the current range.

Put the order the other way round: place first, slice later.

At the moment of placing, being unable to decompose is fine. You cannot decompose because you do not yet know the process. The process arrives while you are moving.

Then what does merely placing produce? A criterion for judgement enters. The options in front of you become viewable in relation to what you placed. Near or far. That judgement works without decomposition being finished. And while repeating that judgement, the route gradually comes into view. Slice from wherever you can see.

This is not about leaving something unsliced for years. Slice once slicing becomes possible. The point of order is only that being sliceable is not a condition for placing.

This order comes with a difficulty in measurement. With no decomposed list, progress cannot be read from a completion rate. What to read instead is handled by the three checks on how the goal was placed.

Slicing first carries a practical cost: the sliced list becomes the work itself.

With a list, you can complete items. Completing produces a sense of progress. The sense sustains the effort. So far this is an advantage.

The problem is that the contents of the list were split with your current procedures. So completing them means having gone carefully around the inside of your current range. The list empties and the position does not move.

And this state is hard to spot, because it is clearly different from doing nothing. Hands really are moving and records really accumulate. Only the position is not moving, and position does not appear in records.

So it pays to check once before slicing. When this entire list is complete, will the shape of a day be different from now? If not, the object being sliced is wrong.

The Operation of Working Backwards Itself Impedes Acquiring the Structure

The reason for reversing the order is not only practical observation. There is a backing on the side of learning.

The cognitive psychologist John Sweller published a study in Cognitive Science in 1988 (volume 12, number 2, pages 257–285) 10.1207/s15516709cog1202_4. Solving by working backwards from the goal and filling in the means solves the problem while impeding the learning of the problem’s structure.

The mechanism sits in resources. Working backwards repeats an operation of looking at the difference between the current state and the goal, then searching for a move that narrows it. That operation occupies working memory, so no capacity remains for extracting the structure of the problem itself. The problem gets solved, and no transferable form remains for the next similar problem.

The same body of work shows the reverse operation. Remove the specific goal and set the task as “find everything you can,” and learning on the same problem improves. With the goal gone, no difference-reducing operation is generated, so resources reach the structure.

Decomposing first on the business side is exactly that backward operation. You are trying to fill the gap between your current position and the placement with the procedures you now hold. The gap closes and the list gets completed. What does not remain is the structure of that territory.

What Sweller set his participants was mathematics and physics problems with known solutions, not the direction of a business. Problems have correct answers; placements do not. What can be carried out is only the part of the shape where working backwards occupies resources and impedes acquiring structure.

Even so, that shape explains one thing. Observing that the list is being completed while the position does not move is not a matter of hours invested. It follows from the nature of the backward operation.

And the explanation changes the direction of the response. Not stopping the backward work but moving the point at which it starts. Work backwards after the structure is somewhat visible and the difference-reducing operation no longer impedes acquisition. Start before anything is visible and the gap closes while nothing becomes visible.

Could last year’s version of you have written that decomposition unchanged? That single question settles it. If yes, the procedures used are last year’s. Same procedures, same range in the list that emerges.

Not “Absent” but “Not Placed”

“Having no goal” reads as pointing at a state where a goal does not exist. Goals, though, are not discovered but placed.

That difference changes the next move. For what does not exist, waiting or searching are the only options. For what gets placed, you can place it. There is no need to wait for the conditions of placing to be met.

Why not place it, then? Two reasons come up often.

The first is avoiding placing it in the wrong spot. Better not to place it than to place it and find out it was wrong.

The second is feeling that once placed it must be defended. Changing something once placed would be inconsistent.

Both overestimate the cost of placing. The actual cost is lower.

On the first: whether the placement was wrong is knowable only after placing. No method exists for confirming correctness beforehand, so the order of confirming then placing does not stand.

On the second: a placed destination may be changed. No condition attaches that it cannot be. Placing, moving, finding the view changed, and placing again also happens.

Placing has no substitute, and not only for reasons of motivation. It follows from the use it is put to. A goal is used as a criterion for sorting the options in front of you. To work as a criterion, you have to accept choosing by it. A criterion you do not accept produces results that do not get adopted.

A goal decided for you by someone else functions as an object of management. Deadlines arrive, progress gets reported, achievement happens. What does not function is the judging. When an unplanned option arrives, sorting it by that criterion stalls.

Placing it yourself does not make anything work, either. If the placement sits in the extension of the present, it will not work as a criterion. That side of the condition is handled squarely in Self-transformation does not last because the order is reversed. What this article handles is the estimated cost of placing itself.

The description “simply not placed” is uncomfortable. If it is absent, nothing can be done; if it is merely unplaced, you end up accounting for why. That discomfort is also the reverse side of a next move existing.

The Reach of the Prescription to Set Both Medium and Long Term

Of the four advertised answers, setting both a medium-term and a long-term goal has a clear effect. With only a long term, what to do this week is undecided. With only a medium term, whether that medium term is right cannot be judged.

Hold both and both resolve. The long term settles the meaning of the medium term; the medium term brings the long term to a reachable distance.

With that granted, this prescription carries one premise: that the long term sits outside your current range.

Place both on the extension of the present and the two line up on one line. The long term becomes “more of the medium term stacked up.” Only the length differs; the direction is the same.

In that state the benefit of holding a long term does not appear, because the role of settling the medium term’s meaning works only when the long term carries a different criterion. An extension of the same criterion settles nothing.

Set a medium term of “eighty thousand a month in revenue” and a long term of “two hundred thousand a month.” The two sit on one criterion. The long term adds nothing to judging the medium term. A bigger number sits further away.

Set the long term as “a state where income is decided by my own judgement” and the criterion changes. Candidates for the medium term become sortable by it. Among the routes to eighty thousand, which is nearer the long-term criterion and which is further. The same medium-term goal shifts position depending on how it is reached.

The long term does not have to be measurable. Demanding measurability drops the placement inside the territory where an indicator is already in hand. The long term only has to work as a criterion; the object of measurement can sit at the medium term.

This prescription also has an ordering issue: the medium term often gets placed first. In practice it sits nearer, so it settles first. This period’s revenue, this year’s target. These settle naturally in the course of running a business. The long term gets added afterwards.

Added afterwards, it tends to land on the extension of the already-settled medium term. The medium term becomes the criterion and the long term its extension. The state of lining up on one line comes from this order.

So reverse the order of placing. Place the long term first and select the medium term from it. The medium term then becomes something chosen among candidates, and a chosen medium term carries the reason for choosing.

With a reason attached, it can be rebuilt when the situation changes. A medium term with no reason cannot be judged for whether it should change. So it stays as it is.

Distant Goals Turn Abstract Because Construal Matches Distance

The long term was placed as something that does not have to be measurable. There is a backing for that which is not the writer’s convenience.

Distant goals turning abstract is not a lack of rigour. The psychologists Yaacov Trope and Nira Liberman published a synthesis in Psychological Review in 2010 (volume 117, number 2, pages 440–463) 10.1037/a0018963. The more psychologically distant something is, the more abstractly it is construed; the nearer, the more concretely. Distance comes in four kinds — time, space, social distance, and likelihood — and all four work in the same direction.

What follows is that abstract and concrete are not degrees of correctness but forms of construal matched to distance. Try to write a distant thing concretely and you end up shortening the distance instead. Shorten the distance and you are back inside the range.

So the advice to “make the long term more concrete” demands, without anyone noticing, two operations at once: placing it far, and writing it as something near. They do not hold together, so distance tends to give way. What gives way is the long term becoming an extension of the medium term. What the writer is left with is the sense of having made it concrete.

The regularity carries a reverse implication too. What is near can only be construed concretely. Try to write this week’s schedule as an abstract state and it will not come out. Even if it does, it is useless for execution. So the medium and long term are separate layers down to the grain of how they are written. Force them to one grain and one of them takes a form that does not match its distance.

Here too, take the range narrowly. What this synthesis handles is the form of construal, not the craft of goal setting. It does not say that writing abstractly makes a goal good. What it says is that being abstract is not by itself evidence of a defect. A rough sentence looking hollow may simply be taking the form its distance calls for.

This arrangement is harder to explain. Tell someone about the long term and you are generally asked what that means concretely. The concrete sits on the side of the medium term, so that is what you end up answering. In the conversation, then, the medium term is the one treated as the goal.

That is friction in practice and not an error of arrangement. The situation of explaining and the situation of judging simply draw on different layers.

What Changes After Placing

First, the reason for declining changes. Before, you declined on terms. The figure does not work, the schedule is tight, the content does not fit. After placing, you can decline on direction. The terms are fine and it points away from where you are going.

That change is observable from outside, because the account of declining comes from your own design rather than from the other side’s terms.

Second, the meaning of the same work changes. Of the work you are carrying, some sits on the direction and some does not. That sorting appears automatically after placing. It emerges as a way of seeing rather than as the product of analysis.

And work on the direction gets done more carefully. Not from resolving to be careful but from knowing what that work is for.

Third, what could not be decided becomes decidable. The angle against what you placed enters as a shared unit, so the same options become comparable. The options did not shrink; the unit of comparison became consistent. The mechanism on the judgement side, of how a state of incomparability arises, belongs to Being unable to decide is not character but the consequence of a structure in which judgement has been handed over.

Wavering does not disappear. It remains. What changes is having somewhere to refer to when you waver.

Fourth, the amount you do not do increases. As an increase it is hard to see, and its effect is not small.

With no criterion, the only reason to decline what arrives is that the terms are bad. If the terms are not bad, you accept. The schedule fills with what came from outside.

This bias has been observed in choice experiments too. The behavioural scientist Shane Frederick and colleagues published a study in the Journal of Consumer Research in 2009 showing that people tend not to factor in what they give up by choosing something (volume 36, number 4, pages 553–561) 10.1086/599764. The same body of work shows that making the forgone side explicit changes the choice.

The same shape works on the request in front of you. The terms of accepting are in front of you; what you could have done with the slot freed by declining is displayed nowhere. What is not displayed does not enter the calculation. So on terms alone, you accept.

A placed goal works as the device producing that display, because once what the slot was for is settled, the forgone side acquires content.

With a criterion in place, you can decline something whose terms are good but which sits outside the direction. The slot declined comes free. What to put in the freed slot becomes your decision.

That change sometimes appears first as a fall in income, since what you declined is subtracted. So this stage has to be anticipated. The fall is itself evidence that the criterion has started working.

Right after placing, conversations with those around you go out of alignment. The criterion they use may be revenue or unit counts. Using the same words, you point at different things.

That is not an error of arrangement but a property of the period when two criteria stand side by side. The state does not resolve until one of them accumulates results. And what decides which one is not the skill of the explanation. It is whether what you put in the freed slot actually comes back. If it comes back, your criterion acquires grounds. If it does not, the old criterion was still the better one.

What Gets Inspected Is the Placing, Not the Goal Itself

Progress is not measurable by completion rate. What this article handled is the stage of placement, so what gets checked is the stage as well.

First, check that sliceability is not being used as a condition for placing. If what you placed decomposed cleanly from the start, you may have placed it to fit what decomposes. Open the list in your hands and ask, item by item, whether last year’s version of you could have written it. If the answer is yes, you are working with last year’s process. Decomposition belongs to a process that comes into view while moving. At the stage of placing, rough is fine.

Second, check that the indicator has not turned into the goal itself. When you placed it, you were watching that indicator for the sake of something. Ask whether you can now say that something out loud. If you cannot, the indicator has moved into the position of the end. Once it has, the faster of the routes satisfying it gets selected automatically, and the choice of route drops out of judgement.

Third, check that it is being used in judging. This is the most direct one. Are the options in front of you being sorted in relation to what you placed? If they are, the goal is working as a criterion. A goal not used in sorting is merely placed and not functioning. Checking the condition on the other side — whether the placement sits outside the range — belongs to Self-transformation does not last because the order is reversed, so it is not repeated here.

Degree of achievement cannot be used for judging. Right after placing it is zero. Being zero does not indicate a failure of placement.

How far away to place it, when to start slicing, how often to review. No figures are given here. Hand over a distance as a number and the destination drifts toward the range that number can measure. The moment measurability is demanded first, the place available for placing is confined to the inside of the range.

There was a block where trying to turn something into a goal made it collapse. What was collapsing was not the placement. What was collapsing was the work of giving it a shape. Measurable, time-bounded, decomposable. All three are needed for managing execution, and all three can be judged only on the indicators and procedures you currently hold. Work to fit that shape and the placement is what moves toward the shape.

Which instrument gets used at which stage. Whether you can hold a goal was settled by that arrangement rather than by technique. Move its use one stage later and the available range widens. Where in that widened range to place something is a separate decision. Fixing the stage is no substitute for choosing the placement.

The next thing to do is not to rewrite the goal. It is to look at which stage the goal now written was made at. Written with decomposability as a condition, it is a product of management rather than of placement. Whether to rewrite it, and how far back to go, is for whoever opens the list to decide.

Where the candidate to place will not surface at all, everything above stops at the first step. Having no dream is not a deficiency picks that up. The block of following a procedure while the position does not move is handled from another side by Self-transformation does not last because the order is reversed.